the sticking point

Whoa, 'Mama! F10

My wife and I are totally thunderstruck by the kindness of ChicagoMama. Yesterday, we received a big box of amazing from her, filled with toys and other goodies for our boys (and for us!). Included among the gifts was even a DVD, and a note suggesting we let it get us through those hours when our days start in the middle of night. So, ChicagoMama isn't just super kind and uber-thoughtful, she also remembers what she reads on The Sticking Point and bestows gifts accordingly. Wow. Too, too nice.

Of course, the 'Mama and her family will be receiving a proper, formal (non-Internet) thank you, but I wanted to let everyone here know how she rolls. Thank you.

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I bought my first-ever entire "album" off the iTunes store yesterday. They'd sent me one of those update emails that mentioned full performances from Austin City Limits. I know some great acts have played there this year, like Cat Power, Jenny Lewis, and deadboy & the Elephantmen. Sure enough, they had an 11-track recording of deadboy that Fat Possum Records didn't even have listed, so I brought it all back home with a download. Ten bucks for eleven awesome songs. I've been listening to that one ALOT in the last 20 hours. (I think I like the live version of "Evil Friend" better than the version on the album.) I immediately burned a copy of these songs, so's the family and I can listen in the car this weekend.

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The 20th Time's a Charm, Dept: On Wednesday night, baby W's twentieth night at home in New York, he slept through the night for the very first time. This followed right on the heels of some particularly wakeful nights, so it came as quite a shock. Such a shock, in fact, that I spent much of that -- my first night to sleep straight through -- awake, waiting for the crying to come. It's like I'm shell-shocked.

Today's Friday 10, now with 30% less irritability.

01 Come On Now - Ramones: Pleasant Dreams is a really cool and often overlooked Ramones album. So good. I think if your collection consists of only the mandatory Ramones releases, those first four from '76 to '78, it's time to do a good thing for yourself. Get another one of their releases every six months or so. It'll take you about seven years to get to ¡Adios Amigos!, and you will have gotten an education for your brain and your earholes. Trust me, those albums you think are sub-par? Check 'em. Every second of the Ramones musical canon is worth hearing, early and often.

02 City Baby Attacked By Rats - GBH: Oh, these Birmingham guys are just hilarious, and not in a good way. In the early 80s, their name started showing up on jackets of local punks, so my friends and I checked them out. We saw them at the Ritz, and giggled our asses off through most of the show. They seemed so insincere. The band was copping all these hot "rock star" poses while struggling to find the right frets on their guitars. For years, we told anyone who asked that G.B.H. was "British slang for poser." All in all, though, as British "punk/metal" goes, they are twice as good as Exploited, and half as good as Discharge. "City Baby..." was their first single, I think. It's also on the debut album.

03 The Wait - The Pretenders: The great Pretenders. You probably know as much as I do (or more) about the Pretenders. Chrissie shows up in a lot of punk rock documentaries, and I think it surprises a lot of people to learn that she was there, then. Yes, she hung with the Pistols, Gen X, UK Subs, and the kids from Eater, worked at McLaren's Sex store, wrote for the NME, and was almost in a band that later became the Clash. Some righteous lineage, for sure. (And let's not forget she conceived a child with Ray Davies.) I KNOW you don't need me to tell you how amazing that first Pretenders record is, because you're probably already thinking that you'd like to pull it out and listen to it today. (If you're a fanatic like me, you already know that Rhino released a blown-out version of the debut, with 28 tracks, including some demos and alts. "The Wait" is a great song. Not one of the upper-tier, everyone's favorite tracks, but it oughta be. When you listen to the album later today, dig what James Honeyman-Scott is doing to that guitar on "The Wait." Sick!

04 Shanghai-A-Go-Go - Squirm: I only have a handful of Squirm songs, off singles and comps. They range from mediocre ("Shanghai A-Go-Go") to good ("Dead Girls Don't Say No," "Fuck You Brooke Shields"). The band were part of the very first wave of New York City Hardcore bands, along with Ism, Butch Lust and the Headlickers, and The Mob. This is going back to around '80-'81. The very first comp to capture the scene is the now legendary Big Apple: Rotten to the Core from 1982. Pretty tricky to find now. There's a very short writeup here.

05 Dildos, Bondage, and Toys - Artless Entanglements: A right, snappy song from a classic SST Records sampler called Chunks. Worth getting your hands on. It's got some major punk rock on it, including some songs by bands no one's ever heard of like Black Flag, Minutemen, and Descendents. Artless Entanglements, as it happens, is the one-off project of SST's resident knob-twiddler, Spot.

06 Candy Says - Velvet Underground: I don't know how to write about the Velvet Underground. Flat-out brilliant, and there I stall. This, as you know, is track one, side one of the great self-titled album.
By the way: If you're ever trolling the peer-to-peer directories looking for great music to steal, you might search for a deadboy & the Elephantmen version of this song. They'd play it live, and that's how you'll find it. The version I have is from a January 2004 show at the Renaissance in Lafayette. At the end, Dax says, "That's the Velvet Underground... sorta."

07 World Love - Magnetic Fields: I have never listened to the 69 Love Songs cd. But I've got all the songs on my iTunes, and they fall out of the sky like magic every now and then. I am sure this is one of my favorite albums of the last 10 years.

08 Step Aside - Sleater-Kinney: Hi, we're Sleater-Kinney and we broke up waaaaay before our music went bad. In fact, many say it was still getting better. We released seven not-good-but-great CDs. "Step Aside" is from One Beat. We hear that Tommy Himself is nuts for Corin's Rickenbacher.

09 Alice Springs - Liz Phair: Good old Liz Phair, huh? She still gets 'em out to the shows, still generates our interest with the new music, but nothing matches that Exile album.

10 Absence of God - Rilo Kiley: Is Jenny Lewis one of the best living American songwriters, male or female? Probably. I met her once and literally thanked her for writing "A Better Son/Daughter." I think I might have even done a totally dorky, I'm a mouth-breathing shut-in thing and asked her if I could hug her. Fuck you. I'm not ashamed. I hugged the woman who wrote "A Better Son/Daughter." This track, "Absence of God" is from the More Adventurous disk, which I think is fantastic, but even more amazing once you've heard the records that led up to it. Every Rilo Kiley release has taken a giant step forward. They've been making music for, what? Six years? And yet, they're already one of my all-time favorite bands. Check out what I listen to the most. The Rilos are rubbing weenies with acts like Black Flag, X, and Rollins Band.

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Now do it yourself: Put your digital jukebox or mp3 player on "shuffle all songs." What are the first ten you hear?

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[posted with ecto]

On iTunes right now: Patience from the album All Through a Life by Rites of Spring

Finally, A Wrap Party They Deserve

I don't know what the fundits and comedy wonks are saying, as I haven't read the Monday morning polls, but... this past weekend's Saturday Night Live was absolutely the funniest episode in years. Like, 10+ years.

Obviously, the sketches were funny; but most importantly, they were tight. They got in, got funny, and got out before turning unfunny. A pretty novel approach for the show of late. Credit can be given to Alec Baldwin, who's just funny, inexplicably funny, but still. The writing hit a bullseye nearly every time and the cast was on fire. I know Kristen Wiig will be a star, I just hope it doesn't happen right away because starmaking does not serve SNL well. I've been her fan since she was "Dr. Pat" on the first Joe Schmo season. On SNL, she's either a writers' favorite or she's doing some crisp writing herself. Her "women drinking tea" sketch with Jaime Pressly a few weeks ago was similar in structure and approach to this weekend's "car pool" sketch with Baldwin ("Bobby McFerrin raped my grandmother"). Both were hilarious.

I really appreciated the fact that, while there were plenty of celeb cameos (even Tina Fey, if you want to consider her a "celeb"), the show had enough confidence to let them really be cameos -- not crutches. In recent years, you can bet we'd have seen Martin Short doing a pathetically dated, unnecessary Grimley, instead of what he did Saturday -- deliver a pair of solid lines in a funny new sketch.

The show was nicely paced, too. It came out of the box strong with Wiig doing a nice Nancy Pelosi bit that might have been 15 or 20 seconds too long, a forgivable offense for the cold open. After the monologue, the EZDate commercial parody was great (Wiig making the most of her split second on screen), and the Kevin Federline divorce proceedings sketch was sharp (Britney really does talk that way),

and it ended right on a dime -- without so much as a superfluous syllable. The Valtrex commercial parody (and why shouldn't they do two? If they're funny, do five; it's just a comedy show) was hilaaaarious because Baldwin made it so. ("But then I explained it, and that was the end of it. And there was no need to talk about it.")

The Platinum Lounge sketch touched on a theme I could swear they'd done before (there's a special place at NBC where only stars who've hosted SNL many times are allowed to hang) , but it worked here, with Steve Martin pitch-perfect as usual, and understated cameos by Short and Paul McCartney. (The latter, I believe, was a surprise even to Martin and Baldwin, making Martin's "it is Paul Simon" line a nice piece of textbook improv.)

I dug the sleazy guy ("Roger Corman"?) in Brazil sketch, because it seemed so Bill Murray/late 70s SNL that it gave me a warm feeling inside. It, too, lasted only as long as was necessary, and it contained the following line:

"You know what my favorite part of a woman's body is, really? The vagina."

Two pieces could have been jettisoned from the show. The first was the Tony Bennett talk show, which I suppose happened only because T.B. cameo'd. (That there, is the wrong way to use a cameo.) The other is that Andy Samberg time-killer, "Moment With an Out-Of-Breath Jogger From 1992." Samberg can be funnier than this. There's no "there" there in these atrocious jogger sketches, which he's done twice now; just lazy writing and a performance that would only get a laugh for Gus from Accounts Payable at your office. Samberg -- please stop.

Anyway, funny fucking show, the best I can remember in years, maybe a decade or more. I hope the cast and writing staff are finding their voice and keep rolling them out like this one.

[posted with ecto]

On iTunes right now: Start To Move from the album Pink Flag by Wire

Short Order

I've been out of town, now I'm back, and then I go. So here's a quick one while I'm here. Just some things; kickin' it Larry King style.

How many tons of bombage did the U.S. drop on Zarqawi? I read somewhere that it was a couple 500 pound bombs. That body came out in pretty easy-to-identify condition. I wonder who else was in that building. Can't find any info on that online.

Is it true that Tom Robinson, the great leftist punk rocker, agitator, and gay activist is married to a woman and living in Northern England? That's what I've heard; I have some Googling to do.

Today is H's second birthday. It hurts that he is on vacation -- almost three hundred miles away from me. I miss him so much.

Well, that didn't take much effort: I've already checked up on Tom Robinson. He's got a website with a category link called "Sexuality." Clicking that takes you to bothways.com, where you learn that the homosexual composer of "Glad To Be Gay" (in 1978) is now bisexual, with a song called "Havin' It Both Ways" (1996). I think that's pretty funny stuff right there. Especially on that page where he calls on folks to celebrate "that wider horizon." Cheers to old Tom. I'll never forget the first time I heard "2-4-6-8 Motorway." It was the late fall of 1981, and it came on a cassette tape playing over the speakers at Trash and Vaudeville on St. Mark's Place. I asked the guy at the register what it was and he said, "It's just some tape of mixed songs." I asked him to let me look through the empty cassette boxes on the shelf to see if I can find the song title and artist. No luck at all. But later I went into Sounds record shop and asked for a song that went "something like '2-4-6-8 ain't never too late... me and my radio...." One guy knew what I was babbling about and brought me to the TRB section. I picked out a compilation album called Tom Robinson Band. I started loving the album that very evening. These days, it's not easy to find, but all of those songs are well-scattered among as bunch of Tom Robinson Band comps.

[posted with ecto]

Perchance To Meme...

In 2005, I…

Bought a car
Left Brooklyn after 10 years
Got an address in Queens
Got laid off
Celebrated my first-ever Father’s Day
Enjoyed watching my wife feted on her first-ever Mother’s Day
Began to tolerate, almost like, some of the White Stripes’ songs
Saw my son take his first steps
Heard my son say “Daddy” for the first time
Went to the movies just a couple times
Took my son to his first Yankees game
Was “taken” by my wife and son to the Yankees game on Father’s Day
Did not attend a funeral
Went to just one wedding
Tested my leadership and creative capabilities on a work project
Went to the gym 29 times (2004 – 168 times; 2003 – 221 times)
Saw my grandmother moved into a nursing home
Bought tickets for, but never went to, a Washington Nationals home game
Took my son to his first swim lesson
Almost had to get rid of my dog
Wrote for Jon Stewart (for the first time since 1991)
Saw the New York Dolls for the first time
Saw X for the first time
Hit the saturation point in my bitter hatred of George W Bush and his administration
Worried when H’s doctor detected a slight heart murmur (He's OK.)
Saw three great documentaries [ 1 / 2 / 3 ]
Got to work on a project with some of the finest people I know

.

[posted with ecto]

On iTunes right now: “Downbound Train” from the album His Best (Vol. 1) by Berry, Chuck

H's New Best Friend

Cheers to the Figlet family. They have -- at long last -- finally received their referral this morning. With a momentous phone call from their adoption agency, they've learned that they have a daughter.

In typical Figlet fashion, this great news comes with a hitch. Instead of speeding to the agency in their pimped out ride for the meeting where they learn everything there is to know about their daughter, they'll have to wait another 24 hours for the daddy to get back from a day's work in Philly.

You should stop by her site and wish the new mom well. Or just lurk, and enjoy one of the more interesting weblogs you'll find.

Cheers

Congratulations to my pal S.O'C., who worked on (and supplied the title for) the Academy Award nominated doc Super Size Me.

And thumbs up, as well, to friend-of-a-friend Joe The Artist, who handled the art direction for the movie. Joe's a really cool and very talented guy, who sat in my living room during the American League Championship Series, eating edamome and sketching bizarre cartoons of my dog.

This year's reason for watching the slow-moving kudos-fest: If Super Size Me wins, you're entirely likely to see, assembled onstage behind Morgan Spurlock the motliest collection of creative misfits who've ever rented tuxedos.

Fingers crossed.